Content First Prototyping

Over the last several years, we’ve seen a sharp rise in the availability and popularity of tools for prototyping interaction, motion, and visual design. And with good reason: we’re quickly learning that at multiple points in the design process, there’s no substitute for putting a contextually authentic experience in front of actual users and getting real, actionable feedback.

Yet, the idea of prototyping our content and information design still feels to many agencies and clients like a flight of fancy in the design process. Even when we’re not “just filling in the words later,” we often make major decisions about categories, frames, anchors, and scale without any contextual user feedback (and sometimes hardly recognize that we’re making these decisions at all).

It doesn’t need to be this way. Join me as we explore how to prototype with content and content-driven structure early in the design process – and how to use content-driven design to push your organization or client to think about the actual words users will encounter earlier rather than later (as opposed to the “design container” alone).

In this talk, I’ll show you:

my own personal breaking point with “content-free” design

how I solved the problem of designing “from the content out”

how you can leverage the resources available to you to foster a content driven process in your organization